Desmond Doss honored again

If this keeps up, Desmond Doss might pass Carter Glass and the Rev. Jerry Falwell as Lynchburg’s most famous citizen.

Last week, the Walter Reed Army Hospital Guest House was re-named in honor of Doss, the only conscientious objector to be awarded the Medal of Honor. This comes not long after a documentary film, a book on his life, and the naming of the U.S. 501 bypass for the Lynchburg native.

You might be tempted to lament the fact that the former Army medic (who died in 2006) is missing all this attention, but don’t be. If Doss were still here, he’d probably be mortified — the softspoken Seventh Day Adventist didn’t like to be singled out.

Neither does Tom Keys, but he had no choice.

“When I first heard about him (Doss), it was right after he had died,” said Keys, who works for RST Marketing in Forest. “They were discussing him on some of the talk-radio shows, and so I went to Wikipedia and some other places to find out more about him.

“About the same time, there were a lot of stories about an old, dilapidated building at Walter Reed Hospital that was housing badly injured soldiers, so I wrote a letter to Congressman (Virgil) Goode, suggesting that the building be named for Desmond Doss after it was fixed up. It didn’t have a name — it was just Building 18.”

Keys never got a response from Goode or anyone else, so “to be honest, I just forget about it.”

Then, this past spring, he received a letter on official stationary inviting him to the dedication of the “Desmond T. Doss Guest House” at Walter Reed.

“I think they were just going to tear down the other building,” Keys said, “so they picked the guest house to name after him. I thought, ‘Wow, this is
awesome.’”

And he looked forward to driving up to Washington and standing quietly in the background to see his suggestion come to fruition.

Wrong.

“I got a call about two weeks ago from Herb Rivera, who worked with Col. (Bruce) Haseldon (the garrison commander at Walter Reed),” recalled Keys, “and he asked me if I was going to be there. I said I was, and he said, ‘Good, because you’re the guest of honor.’”

He also asked Keys to say a few words — which, for him, was like being asked to swim through a school of sharks.

“I hate public speaking so much,” Keys said, “that I waited until my senior year of college to take my freshman public speaking course.”

But speak, he did, although it was difficult. So did Col. Gordon R. Roberts, a fellow Medal of Honor winner, who said Doss “deserved so much, but got so
little.”

In case you hadn’t heard the story, Doss enlisted in the Army as a medic in 1942, making it very clear that his religious beliefs precluded him from carrying a weapon. Nor would he work on Saturdays.

These unorthodox (for an Army unit) views subjected him to relentless ridicule (from his fellow soldiers) and persecution (from his superior officers).

On Okinawa one May day in 1945, however, he was credited with saving 75 of his comrades — including some of those who had harassed him — by lowering them down the face of a cliff by rope. Doss was a small, spindly man, and he credited this almost superhuman display of strength and endurance as divinely inspired.

“The guest house is where the families of wounded soldiers come to stay,” Keys said, “and that just seemed like the perfect place to have Desmond’s name.”

Whether he would like it or not.